Southern Rock

[sheclown]

"Gator Country"  Molly Hatchet

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/2r3199mcmO0?version=3&hl=en_US

"Gator Country"

I've been to Alabama, people ain't a whole lot to see;
Skynyrd says it's a real sweet home but it ain't nothing to me.
Charlie Daniels will tell you the good Lord lives in Tennessee, ha!
But I'm going back to gator country where the wine and the women are free.

There's a gator in the bushes, he's calling my name,
And a saying come on boy, you better make it back home again.
There's many roads I've traveled but they all kind of look the same.
There's a gator in the bushes, Lord, he calling my name.

Old Richard Betts will tell ya Lord he was born a Ramblin' Man.
Well he can ramble back to Georgia but I won't give a damn.
Elvin Bishop out struttin' his stuff with little Miss Slick Titty Boom.
But I'm going back to gator country to get me some elbow room.

There's a gator in the bushes he's calling my name.
and saying come on boy, you better make it back home again.
There's many roads I've traveled but they all kinda look the same.
There's a gator in the bushes, Lord, he calling my name. Yep.

There's Marshall Tucker riding a rainbow searching for a pot of gold.
Well they can take the highway, baby, and they can take all they can hold.
The Outlaws down in Tampa town it's a mighty fine place to be.
They got green grass and they got high tides and sure looks good to me.

There's a gator in the bushes, he's calling my name.
Saying come on boy, you better make it back home again.
There's so many roads I've traveled but they all kinda look the same.
There's a gator in the bushes, Lord, he's calling my name.

Oh gator country,
a little bit of that chomp chomp

Love the "hey-you-lookie-here-whistle-call"  in this and so many SR songs.

[sheclown]

Number #94 on the list:  "Rock Bottom"  The Dickey Betts Band

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/dDwUwLXg_Sk?version=3&hl=en_US

Forrest Richard "Dickey" Betts (born December 12, 1943) is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter, and composer best known as a founding member of The Allman Brothers Band. He was inducted with the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995[1] and also won with the band a best rock performance Grammy Award for his instrumental "Jessica" in 1996 [2] Recognized as one of the greatest rock guitar players of all time,[3] he had early on in his career one of rock’s finest guitar partnerships with the late Duane Allman[4] introducing melodic twin guitar harmony and counterpoint which "rewrote the rules for how two rock guitarists can work together, completely scrapping the traditional rhythm/lead roles to stand toe to toe".[5] Dickey Betts was ranked #58 on Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time list in 2003, and #61 on the list published in 2011.[3][6]

[sheclown]

from a facebook post:

Mike Campbell is a Ribault c/o 68 graduate!

Campbell was born in Panama City, Florida. He grew up there and in Jacksonville, Florida, where he graduated from Jean Ribault High School in 1968. At 16, he bought his first guitar, a cheap Harmony model, from a pawnshop. His first electric guitar was a $60 Goyatone. Like Tom Petty, Campbell drew his strongest influences from The Byrds and Bob Dylan, with additional inspiration coming from guitarists such as Scotty Moore, Luther Perkins, George Harrison, Carl Wilson, Jerry Garcia, Roger McGuinn, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Jimmy Page, Mick Taylor, and Neil Young. The first song he learned to play was "Baby Let Me Follow You Down," a song which appeared on Dylan's eponymous debut album.

He formed a band named Dead or Alive which quickly disbanded. He first met Petty through Mudcrutch drummer Randall Marsh when they were auditioning him and he suggested his friend Mike to play rhythm guitar.
Campbell's autograph on a 1975 "Mudcrutch" 45.

Mudcrutch moved to L.A. and signed a record deal with Shelter Records, recording an album in 1974 that ended up being shelved. Campbell then joined Petty to found the original Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in 1975 along with Benmont Tench (keyboards), Ron Blair (bass guitar) and Stan Lynch (drums).
The Heartbreakers

Like the other players in the Heartbreakers, Campbell avoids the virtuoso approach to playing, preferring to have his work serve the needs of each song. Guitar World magazine noted "there are only a handful of guitarists who can claim to have never wasted a note. Mike Campbell is certainly one of them". He is a highly melodic player, often using two or three-strings-at-a-time leads instead of the more conventional one-at-a-time approach. "People have told me that my playing sounds like bagpipes," he muses. "I'm not exactly sure what that means." His estimation of his own style is typically modest: "I don't think people can really top Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton as far as lead guitar goes. I like my playing to bring out the songs." Like Tench, he is heavily involved in constructing the arrangements for the Heartbreakers' tunes. And also like Tench, he prefers rawness to polish in the studio and onstage.

Campbell co-produced the Heartbreakers albums Southern Accents, Pack Up the Plantation: Live!, Let Me Up (I've Had Enough), Into the Great Wide Open, She's the One, Echo, The Last DJ, The Live Anthology and Mojo, as well as the Petty solo albums Full Moon Fever, Wildflowers, and Highway Companion.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/njhMWnGXx-c?version=3&hl=en_US"

[sheclown]

Anyone recognize this Arlington house? My friend Karyn tells me she and her brother would sneak through the woods to listen to the Allman Brothers back in the early 70s -- they would practice in the garage and the music could be heard all throughout their wooded neighborhood.



Could it be the house that is mentioned in Gregg Allman's autobiography?  He describes a house which was built at the turn of the century.  Certainly this house isn't as old.

[sheclown]

more Jacksonville musical history trivia:

"The Ballad of Curtis Loew" 

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/03TgkCVDlrA?version=3&hl=en_US

Well I used to wake the mornin' ... before the rooster crowed
Searchin' for soda bottles to get myself some dough
Brought 'em down to the corner ... down to the country store
Cash 'em in and give my money to a man named Curtis Leow

Old Curt was a black man with white curly hair
When he had a fifth of wine he did not have a care
He used to own an old Dobro ... used to play it across his knees
I'd give old Curt my money ... he'd play all day for me

Play me a song Curtis Leow ... Curtis Leow
Well I got your drinking money ... tune up your Dobro
People said he was useless ... them people all were fools
'Cause Curtis Leow was the finest picker to ever play the blues

He looked to be sixty ... and maybe I was ten
Mama used to whup me but I'd go see him again
I'd clap my hands, stomp my feets, try to stay in time
He'd play me a song or two then take another drink of wine

Play me a song Curtis Leow ... Curtis Leow
Well I got your drinking money ... tune up your Dobro
People said he was useless ... them people all were fools
'Cause Curtis Leow was the finest picker to ever play the blues

Yesssir

On the day old Curtis died nobody came to pray
Ol' preacher said some words and they chunked him in the clay
Well he lived a lifetime playin' the black man's blues
And on the day he lost his life that's all he had to lose

Play me a song Curtis Leow ... hey Curtis Leow
I wish that you was here so everyone would know
People said you were useless ... them people all are fools
'Cause Curtis you're the finest picker to ever play the blues

Allen Collins and Ronnie Van Zant

The band's website says that the song is based on a composite of people who actually lived in the Van Zants' original neighborhood in Jacksonville, FL. Specifically, the country store "is based on Claude's Midway Grocery on the corner of Plymouth and Lakeshore in Jacksonville."[6] The business has since been renamed Sunrise Food Store, but still occupies the same location. The Loew character is sometimes thought by Skynyrd fans to be inspired by Shorty Medlock, the grandfather of Rickey Medlocke, Lynyrd Skynyrd's drummer during their 1970 tour and one of the band's current guitarists.

[/b]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_Curtis_Loew

[sheclown]

BBC's delicious documentary on Southern Rock  "Pioneers:  The Forefathers of Southern Rock"

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/1qFTyv0ObuI?version=3&hl=en_US

watch and see how this music was born from the 'mean streets of Jacksonville'  (well, maybe Macon had something to do with it too).

Great footage.  Worth the watch.

[sheclown]

...and speaking of Shorty Medlocke

Shorty Medlocke (1910 â€" 1982) was an American delta blues and hard rock musician and composer.

A descendant of the Blackfoot Confederacy, he is the grandfather of Rickey Medlocke.[1]

Starting in 1979, Shorty made contributions to Blackfoot's music. He wrote the Top 40 hit "Train Train" (released on the album Strikes), and played harmonica on the track.[1] For the follow-up album Tomcattin', Shorty co-wrote the song "Fox Chase" and gave the song a short introduction.[2] For Marauder, Shorty co-wrote "Rattlesnake Rock 'n' Roller" and played banjo on the track.[3] Shorty had also appeared on Blackfoot's 1975 debut album, No Reservations, singing a version of "Railroad Man" (which he also wrote).

Shorty is also rumored to be the inspiration for the fictional character Curtis Loew, who appears in the Lynyrd Skynyrd song "The Ballad of Curtis Loew"

http://www.michaelherring.com/shorty.html

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/Ru8m0Qrc0vg?version=3&hl=en_US

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/AoDPlGIfemU

[sheclown]

The band's website says that the song is based on a composite of people who actually lived in the Van Zants' original neighborhood in Jacksonville, FL. Specifically, the country store "is based on Claude's Midway Grocery on the corner of Plymouth and Lakeshore in Jacksonville."[6] The business has since been renamed Sunrise Food Store, but still occupies the same location. The Loew character is sometimes thought by Skynyrd fans to be inspired by Shorty Medlock, the grandfather of Rickey Medlocke, Lynyrd Skynyrd's drummer during their 1970 tour and one of the band's current guitarists.

[sheclown]

Duane Allman, the prince of Southern Rock, the golden god.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/yYz3E4MckSw

It was during that tour [July 1973,] that we were visited by a young, and I mean young, reporter for Rolling Stone named Cameron Crowe.  Of course, I had no idea he would go on to make Almost Famous nearly thirty years later, and that it would include some of our stories.

     When that movie came out in 2000, my only thought was that I wished my brother could've been there to watch it, though I'm sure he saw it from his big seat...

    ...But the jumping off the roof into the pool, that was Duane--from the third floor of a place called the Travelodge in San Francisco.  I got up there with him, but I said no, this is too high--I might miss.  My brother wanted to do it again, but the cat who owned the place came out shaking his fist, yelling at him.  My brother was somewhat of a daredevil, and he and Oakley would do shit like that.  We told that story all the time, and I have no doubt that Cameron was around for it.

"My Cross to Bear" Gregg Allman

[sheclown]

 It picks me up when I'm feeling blue...how 'bout you?

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/RHsDa9_HSlA

Sweet Home Alabama Meaning
How deep is your love for this song? Go deeper.
In the 1950s and '60s, Alabama was ground zero for the Civil Rights Movement.

It was in Alabama that Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. Martin Luther King led protest marchers on a long walk from Selma to Montgomery. In Birmingham, police attacked civil rights demonstrators with dogs and fire hoses, and Ku Klux Klansmen blew up a black church, killing four little girls attending Sunday School inside.

Social changeâ€"racial changeâ€"came to Alabama in a hurry… but not without generating stiff resistance from more than a few tradition-minded white folks who liked things just fine under the old Jim Crow system of racial segregation. They rallied around their defiant governor, George Wallace, who marked his inauguration into office in early 1963 by declaring, "I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

To many outsidersâ€"especially to liberal-minded people from the Northâ€"white Alabamians' militant defense of the color line seemed, simply, indefensible.

Neil Young certainly saw things that way. The Canadian-born rock legend recorded a pair of tracks, "Southern Man" and "Alabama," ripping white southerners for standing in the way of progress. "Southern man," Young sang, "better keep your head / Don't forget what your Good Book says / Southern change gonna come at last / Now your crosses are burning fast."

The southern men who comprised Lynyrd Skynyrd were huge fans of Neil Young and his music, but they felt that Young had gone too far in launching his broadside attack against the entire South and all its (white) people. The Skynyrd boys weren't racists; what gave Neil Young the right to judge them? Or, as band frontman Ronnie Van Zant put it in a 1974 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, "We thought Neil was shooting all the ducks to kill one or two." Not every southern man was a cross-burning bigot; was every white southerner supposed to feel ashamed merely for being who he was?

So Lynyrd Skynyrd went into an Atlanta recording studio late in 1973 to cut "Sweet Home Alabama", a record self-consciously designed to serve as the South's answer to "Southern Man" and "Alabama." The result was the biggest hit of their career (and a much bigger hit than either of the Neil Young tunes that inspired it), a hard-rocking anthem of southern pride that remains a staple of frat party DJs and classic-rock radio stations to this day. Few would argue against the idea that "Sweet Home Alabama" is worthy of consideration for any shortlist of the greatest rock songs ever.

So there's not much question that "Sweet Home Alabama" was a success, as a song. But did it succeed as the South's answer to northern criticisms of southern culture?

That all depends on what you think the song actually means. We know that the song was written as a direct response to a couple of Neil Young tunes criticizing southerners for racism. We know that the song invokes a series of hot-button political referencesâ€"to segregationist Governor George Wallace, to the city of Birmingham where much bloody violence occurred during the Civil Rights Movement, to President Nixon's Watergate scandal. We know that that key verse ends with Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant sneering that all that stuff "does not bother me / does your conscience bother you?"

But we really don't know exactly what that means.

Many fans (and critics) have heard the song as a simple and straightforward attack on Neil Young (and northerners in general) and a militant defense of the South, its traditional "good ol' boy" culture, and perhaps even its system of white supremacy. In this interpretation, the song is a kind of redneck anthem, defiantly flipping the bird to sanctimonious liberals and northerners. A casual listen to the lyrics certainly lends itself easily to this interpretation, as does the enduring image of Lynyrd Skynyrd performing the song live before thousands of (almost entirely white) fans with a giant Confederate battle flag hanging behind the stage and hundreds more waving in the crowd.

But there's another way to hear the song, in which "Sweet Home Alabama" sends a much more complex and nuanced message than most people usually think. Interestingly, it is this alternative interpretation that seems to have been favored by Lynyrd Skynyrd and, perhaps surprisingly, also by Neil Young.

In this version, the song is less a defense of the worst aspects of modern southern history than a simple reminder that northerners have their own problems and that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. In this version, the backup singers' chorus ("Boo! Boo! Boo!") after the line about loving George Wallace is intended to signal the band's disapproval of the segregationist governor's racial politics; the next line, "we all did what we could do," might then mean that they had tried to work against him. "Now Watergate does not bother me" might be understood as something more than a line designed simply to aggravate liberal foes of President Nixon. It might be heard, instead, as Van Zant arguing that he wasn't judging all individual northerners to be bad people because their president had committed bad acts; they shouldn't judge him for the things George Wallace did either.

So… "Does your conscience bother you?"

Like any work of art, "Sweet Home Alabama" means what its listeners think it means. It's fascinating that both Neil Young and George Wallace reportedly loved the song. Ronnie Van Zant and the band worked the ambiguity to great effect; they performed beneath the stars and bars but also called the eruption of Confederate paraphernalia among their fans "embarrassing." They publicly criticized George Wallace's racism, but happily accepted the governor's invitation to personally anoint them Grand Marshalls of the State of Alabama. They told Neil Young, in so many words, that "a Southern Man don't need him around," but continued to idolize the man and his music; Ronnie Van Zant often wore a Neil Young t-shirt in concert, and was hoping to collaborate with him on a new record before those plans were destroyed by the plane wreck that killed Van Zant and two of his bandmates in 1977.

That tragic accident made it impossible for Ronnie Van Zant to further clarify what "Sweet Home Alabama" meant to him.

So what's it mean to you?

http://www.shmoop.com/sweet-home-alabama/meaning.html

[Adam W]

^I always thought those lyrics were, if not racist, naive at best. Maybe they guys in Lynyrd Skynyrd weren't bigots - who knows. I sure don't. But how can anyone with a shred of conscience not be bothered by George Wallace?

But it's a great song (even though I'm sick to death of hearing it) and it definitely rules the classic rock airwaves.

[sheclown]

I'm no expert in anything (perhaps old houses), but I did grow up in that time.  I watched the Watergate trials on TV during my senior year in high school (it was government class, the teacher was getting stoned in the parking lot and leaving us to be entertained by the scandal on the rather small TV in the corner.)  I watched my dad struggle with the cruelty of Kent State, he BELIEVED in his government, but he loved his teenage daughter and MY GOD, it could have been her shot to death.  I threw away my bra because (as everyone knew) it was merely a sign of male bondage.  But mostly I remember seeing my mom cry as she got off of the commuter bus during the race riots in DC.

These were tough times.

And NOTHING was as it seemed.

Point is that the governor would not have liked Ronnie Van Zant if he had seen him just walking down the sidewalk.  He would have yelled out "git a haircut you no-good hippie!"

But "Sweet Home Alabama" isn't about that crazy time.  It isn't about racism, really, or the government corruption of Watergate, it is about a man defending the honor of his home.

And his home includes Alabama.  And while he might, or might not, have disagreements with the governor, he certainly doesn't want the north talking badly about "his kin".

A defiant defense of the home-front by a favored son.   

[sheclown]

"Fat Man in the Bathtub"  Little Feat

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/VDp3Grz28mE

http://www.littlefeat.net/

When Little Feat was at its best, the band blended complex rhythms, multiple styles and time signatures not only within the same song, but often within a few measures. Take the case of “Fat Man in the Bathtub,” one of the band’s signature originals, which features elements of funk, blues, doo-wop and Latin music underneath Lowell George’s gritty vocal delivery.

George’s lyrics tell the sad tale of protagonist “Spotcheck Billy,” who seems to be suffering from a lack of sex or drugs or both, depending on your view. Some have said that the song is an autobiographical account; that George is the “Fat Man in the Bathtub,” while others theorize that Lowell was referring to one of his many famous musician friends.

Little Feat first recorded “Fat Man in the Bathtub” for 1973’s Dixie Chicken, the band’s first album with Kenny Gradney on bass, Paul Barrere on second guitar and Sam Clayton on percussion. “Fat Man” saw its first live action in ‘73 and remained a staple of the group’s live repertoire throughout every period of their career.

http://phish.net/song/fat-man-in-the-bathtub/history

[johnnyman]

This is  a great thread.  Bought some music last weekend (iTunes)based on all the suggestions that have been made here.  Seagal's music is really quite good.  That guy keeps surprising me.

[Traveller]

In addition to Drive By Truckers, another more recent band that's got a southern rock sound is Lucero out of Memphis.